• Augusta Gein, the woman who drove a man Psycho

    From Isabel Adami@21:1/5 to All on Thu Oct 20 09:22:02 2016
    El domingo, 29 de abril de 2007, 6:51:14 (UTC-3), dd...@bellsouth.net escribió:
    Augusta Gein, the woman who drove a man Psycho
    By
    Denise Noe


    A movie had just been released that is billed as "the beginning" of
    "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." This cult classic, along with Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, "Psycho" and other films, was inspired by the
    crimes of Ed Gein.

    This seems like a appropriate time to review the life of Ed Gein or
    perhaps more pertinently, "the beginning" of his ghastly life. Ed Gein
    is the classic case of a man driven "psycho" by a woman - his mother,
    Augusta Gein.

    Gein's crimes came to light in 1957.

    Bernice Worden was a stocky, bespectacled middle-aged woman who ran a
    store in the hamlet of Plainfield, Wisconsin, a town that had only
    several hundred residents. Her adult son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, discovered her missing from the store. He looked for her and found the
    cash register missing. Then he saw that the area around the counter
    was ominously spattered with blood.

    Mr. Worden phoned other officers and said, "He's done something to
    her." They asked who and he replied, "Eddie Gein."

    Gein seemed an odd person to finger as a potential abductor. He was a pleasant, shy, well-mannered bachelor. He only drank an occasional
    beer. He never swore.

    However, Frank Worden suspected him because Bernice had complained
    about his pestering to get her to go out with him.

    Of course it was Gein as a horrified world would soon learn. Gein had
    shot and killed Bernice Worden, decapitated her, and hung the headless
    body upside down from the rafters of his kitchen. It soon emerged
    that Gein was also the killer of Mary Hogan, a middle-aged tavern
    owner, who had disappeared from a nearby town a few years earlier.

    Other murders would be attributed to him but these are the only he is
    known with certainty to have committed.

    Perhaps even more shocking than the two killings was the state of Ed
    Gein's home. Most of the abode was filthy and cluttered but what it
    was cluttered with made the normal mind reel as Gein had filled his
    house with body parts taken from grave robberies. The body parts had
    been taken from the graves of middle-aged and older women.

    This extraordinarily sensational case would be even more
    sensationalized with wide reports of cannibalism. However, Harold
    Schechter, who wrote "Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original 'Psycho," has stated that there is no evidence that Gein ever
    ate human flesh. Perhaps the perception of Gein-the-cannibal is a
    result of seeing him as such a monster that every possible monstrosity
    was attributed to him.

    One part of the house Gein's house not cluttered. The bedroom and
    parlor of Augusta Gein, Ed Gein's deceased mother, the area had been
    sealed off from the rest of the dwelling. When it was exposed to
    view, was found to be perfectly tidy. As Schecter astutely wrote,
    "After the unholy squalor of the rest of the house, the very neatness
    of these rooms was intensely unsettling." Alfred Hitchcock captured
    that sense of eeriness in "Psycho" when Lila Crane (Vera Miles)
    ventures into the room of Norman Bates' "Mother."

    The origin of Ed Gein's madness turned out to lie in the overly close relationship of Ed to his beloved mother, Augusta.

    Edward Theodore Gein was born in Le Crosse, Wisconsin August 27, 1906,
    the second child of George and Augusta Gein.

    George Gein was a hard drinking man who drifted from job to job,
    selling insurance, doing carpentry and working as a tanner, in a power
    plant, and at a railway. Despite his boozing, George had a ramrod
    straight posture and dignified manner that could make a positive
    impression.

    At 24, George met a 19-year-old named Augusta upon whom he evidently
    made such an impression.

    Augusta was a large-breasted, heavyset young woman with a broad face.
    She had been brought up in a deeply religious Lutheran household.
    Augusta had been especially close to her strict father who took
    seriously the Biblical injunction that to "spare the rod" is to "spoil
    the child."

    George and Augusta Gein married December 4, 1899. The marriage was
    troubled from the start. George's drinking meant he had trouble
    keeping a job. He drank the couple's money away and Augusta furiously
    derided him. Not a verbal person, George responded to her tirades by alternating giving her the silent treatment or hitting her.

    Their sex life was never good, in part because of Augusta's extreme
    beliefs on the subject. She believed fornication and adultery were the
    worst of sins. She saw sex even within marriage as a distasteful, an expression of a husband's vile lust and a duty a wife performed for
    the sake of procreation. For all her Bible reading, Augusta appeared
    to have overlooked or disregarded the Song of Solomon with is richly
    sensuous and frankly erotic paean to sexual desire and enjoyment
    between husband and wife. Nor does she appear to have realized the
    full implications of the phrase in Genesis describing married people
    as "one flesh."

    However, Augusta yearned for a baby so she did her sexual duty,
    distasteful as it was.

    George and Augusta's first son, Henry, was born January 17, 1902.

    His birth gave Augusta someone upon whom to lavish affection but it
    did not improve the Gein marriage. George Gein continued to bounce
    from job to job and Augusta continued to harangue him.

    Augusta decided that the solution to George's employmnet difficulties
    was for him to go into business for himself. In 1909, George became
    the owner of a small grocery store. A classic "mom and pop" operation, Augusta did much of the work as George would not give up liquor and
    apply himself to the business.

    The birth of Henry had not assuaged Augusta's longings. She believed
    it might be because he was a boy. Augusta was a man-hater but her
    misandry does not appear to have been "feminist." Rather, her severe anti-sexual feelings led her to hate men because they caroused around, committing fornication and adultery. Her stern religiosity led her to
    despise the sex that so frequently took the Lord's name in vain.

    Augusta believed a little girl would be much easier to bring up in
    what she considered traditionally proper ways. A female would be far
    more likely to be chaste and pious, sober and obedient.

    She again allowed George to have sex and again got pregnant. She
    prayed for a girl.

    But she gave birth to Edward Theodore Gein.

    She was bitterly disappointed when she learned her child was a boy.
    However, as Schechter writes, "Augusta was not the kind to give in to despair. She was made of stronger stuff. And so she took the swaddled
    newborn in her arms and made a sacred vow. This one would not grow up
    to be like all the rest of them. Men. Those lustful, swearing, foul-
    mouthed creatures who made use of women's bodies in such filthy ways,
    This one, she promised, would be different. Augusta would see to
    that."

    When the adult Ed Gein was asked about his mother, tears would
    inevitably fill his eyes. She was so good, he would say, so pure and
    pious. She was exactly what a woman should be.

    When Eddie was seven, Augusta decided that the family must leave La
    Crosse. She believed the city was a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah,
    full of fornication and adultery. Her sons must not be exposed to such degradation as she was determined to bring them up to be free of
    sexual sin.

    The Geins had accumulated enough money to purchase a small farm. Late
    in 1913, the family bought a small dairy farm about forty miles east
    of La Crosse.

    For reasons that are not known, the family moved again in 1914 to a
    farm in Plainfield.

    Augusta was pleased with the most recent acquisition. The farm was 195
    acres and boasted a fairly nice two-story house along with a barn, a
    chicken coop, and an equipment shack.

    Its isolation was a big plus because here Augusta could keep her
    precious sons safe from the temptations of Plainfield itself. She
    believed sinful, ungodly activities, particularly sexual activities,
    were rampant in the town.

    A fastidious housekeeper, Augusta kept the home squeaky clean and neat
    as a pin. She believed in the maxim that "cleanliness is next to
    godliness" and no one was more determined to be godly than Augusta
    Gein.

    Although Augusta wanted to keep her boys as far away from earthly
    temptations as she could, there was no way to avoid sending them to
    school since it was compulsory.

    Little Eddie was an average student. He soon acquired a special
    fondness for reading that he would maintain throughout his life.

    However, he did not enjoy school. As Schecter writes, Eddie "had a
    fat, fleshy growth on the corner of his left eyelid. It wasn't really disfiguring, but it made his eyelid droop." Some children teased
    Eddie about the eyelid. He was shy and hung back from groups. He could
    not make friends.

    Occasionally, he would find a child that he hoped to befriend. When he
    got home, he would tell Mom about the kid. She would inevitably raise objections, saying the proposed pal was from a family with a bad
    reputation.

    The marriage between George and Augusta, never warm, was getting
    increasingly fractious. He retreated into drink and she into an ever
    more fervent and narrow religiousness. Fights were frequent and bitter
    but divorce was out of the question. As Schecter notes, "Divorce was unthinkable, a fundamental violation of her religious beliefs." To
    Augusta Gein, life was not something to be enjoyed but a series of
    burdens to be borne. She did her duty no matter what.

    As Henry and Ed grew into adolescence, Augusta made an extra effort to
    ensure these boys did not fall into the ways of sin like other young
    men. Modern women were a bunch of brazen hussies, she would tell the
    boys, and these evil creatures must be righteously shunned.

    Often Augusta read out loud to Henry and Ed directly from the Bible.
    Almost always, she read warnings against lustful iniquity.

    A favorite passage was Revelation 17: 3-5. It stated, "So he carried
    me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon
    a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven
    heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet
    colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a
    golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, 'MYSTERY,
    BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE
    EARTH."

    Augusta also liked to recite Proverbs 5:3-4 to her sons:
    "The lips of a strange woman drop honey,
    And her mouth is smoother than oil;
    But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,
    Sharp as a two-edged sword."

    Augusta frequently asked her sons to swear that they would remain
    sexually pure. The dutiful boys affirmed that they would.

    In 1940, George Gein passed away at the age of 66. It is unlikely he
    was deeply mourned by his widow or sons. In 1942, 36-year-old Ed Gein
    got a draft notice. He went to Milwaukee for the physical exam and
    the military rejected him due to the growth on his eyelid because it
    caused slight problems with his vision.

    Back to home, Henry, and Mom. In 1944, Henry was killed in a brush
    fire near the Gein farmhouse. Although later many suspected Ed, it was
    never proven that he caused his brother's death.

    So then it was just Ed and Mom. As Tony Perkins playing Gein-inspired
    Norman Bates in "Psycho" would say, "A boy's best friend is his
    mother" and they were each other's primary company.

    However, Augusta suffered a stroke soon after her elder's son
    unexpected death. She was able to come home from the hospital but was disabled. Ed tended to her every need. As she had so often read the
    Bible to her sons, she now requested that Ed read it to her as he sat
    by her bedside.

    Under Eddie's dedicated ministrations, Augusta began to recover. She
    was back to walking and even doing some household and farm chores. It
    was 1945 and Augusta noted that they needed straw.

    Eddie and Augusta went to a neighbor named Smith to buy it. When their vehicle pulled into Smith's yard, they saw him violently beating a dog
    with a stick. A woman came out of the house and screamed at Smith to
    leave the poor pooch alone. Smith beat the dog to death.

    Augusta was extremely upset by this scene. What bothered her did not
    appear to be the brutality toward the dog but the presence of the
    woman. Augusta told Ed that the woman was not married to Smith and so
    had no business being there. "Smith's harlot," Augusta angrily called
    her.

    It always seemed to Ed that Augusta's emotional upheaval over this
    apparently unmarried relationship is what contributed to the second,
    and fatal, stroke she suffered later that week.

    Augusta had sown the seeds of Ed's madness. But she had also been his
    one human connection. Without her, the lonely and isolated man
    descended into true insanity. However, that craziness would be of a
    special sort not evident to his neighbors who continued to see him as
    shy, quiet, pleasant Eddie Gein.

    Until Frank Worden found that his own mother was missing.

    Although Ed Gein is often called a serial murderer, Bernice Worden and
    Mary Hogan are his only known victims. Both were stout, older women -
    like his mother. However, in some ways they seemed most unlike his
    mother to Ed.

    In the aftermath of Augusta Gein's death, Ed pondered long and hard at
    this cruel injustice. In a world filled with harlots, how could God
    have allowed his mother, a woman so good and pure, to die?

    Mary Hogan bore a physical resemblance to Augusta but Ed thought of
    the tavern keeper as opposite in personality. She used swear words. He
    had heard rumors of her immorality, how she had been twice divorced
    and may even have once been the madam of a brothel! Her very life
    seemed an affront to the memory of his mother.

    Similarly, although Bernice Worden was popular in Plainfield, Ed saw
    the hearty business owner as a Scarlet Woman. He had heard rumors
    that, prior to her marriage, Bernice had wooed the man who would
    become her husband away from another woman and that the disappointed
    woman had committed suicide as a result. He also believed Bernice
    Worden had been responsible for the break-up of a marriage.

    Ultimately, what is to be learned from the life of Augusta Gein? It
    may be seen as a confirmation of the old saying, "The road to hell is
    paved with good intentions." It is also a warning on many levels:
    against "smother-mothering," against sexual repression, against
    religious fanaticism, and against a life lived in a "bite-the-bullet, all-work-and-no-play" manner.

    It is also a reminder that misandry and misogyny are not necessarily
    polar opposites but can go hand-in-hand. Like Augusta, the same person
    who views men as crude and lustful beasts can often view women as
    temptresses and harlots.

    In today's culture, the pendulum may have swung too far in the
    opposite direction from Augusta Gein's dogmas. Many people, including
    myself, would like to see less sexual activity. However, looking at
    Augusta tells us we must exercise great care as to HOW we encourage abstinence. It is easy, yet destructive, to encourage abstinence by inculcating suspicion and hostility of the other gender or of human
    beings in general. Both young men and young women must be taught how
    to keep friendships on a "just-friends" basis and how to keep romantic relationships from necessarily becoming physical too quickly. But they
    must not be abstinent out of a hysterical fear of the flesh or a
    destructive hostility.

    "Just Say No" can turn into its own dangerous form of obsession as
    shown by the peculiarly one-track mind of Augusta Gein.

    hello, I´m Isabel and I am from Uruguay, I´m writing a thesis about Ed Gein and I need more information. if you or someone cuan help me i will so greatefuly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From humanityforeallforever@gmail.com@21:1/5 to dd...@bellsouth.net on Fri Oct 30 14:25:08 2015
    On Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 2:51:14 AM UTC-7, dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
    Augusta Gein, the woman who drove a man Psycho
    By
    Denise Noe


    A movie had just been released that is billed as "the beginning" of
    "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." This cult classic, along with Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, "Psycho" and other films, was inspired by the
    crimes of Ed Gein.

    This seems like a appropriate time to review the life of Ed Gein or
    perhaps more pertinently, "the beginning" of his ghastly life. Ed Gein
    is the classic case of a man driven "psycho" by a woman - his mother,
    Augusta Gein.

    Gein's crimes came to light in 1957.

    Bernice Worden was a stocky, bespectacled middle-aged woman who ran a
    store in the hamlet of Plainfield, Wisconsin, a town that had only
    several hundred residents. Her adult son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, discovered her missing from the store. He looked for her and found the
    cash register missing. Then he saw that the area around the counter
    was ominously spattered with blood.

    Mr. Worden phoned other officers and said, "He's done something to
    her." They asked who and he replied, "Eddie Gein."

    Gein seemed an odd person to finger as a potential abductor. He was a pleasant, shy, well-mannered bachelor. He only drank an occasional
    beer. He never swore.

    However, Frank Worden suspected him because Bernice had complained
    about his pestering to get her to go out with him.

    Of course it was Gein as a horrified world would soon learn. Gein had
    shot and killed Bernice Worden, decapitated her, and hung the headless
    body upside down from the rafters of his kitchen. It soon emerged
    that Gein was also the killer of Mary Hogan, a middle-aged tavern
    owner, who had disappeared from a nearby town a few years earlier.

    Other murders would be attributed to him but these are the only he is
    known with certainty to have committed.

    Perhaps even more shocking than the two killings was the state of Ed
    Gein's home. Most of the abode was filthy and cluttered but what it
    was cluttered with made the normal mind reel as Gein had filled his
    house with body parts taken from grave robberies. The body parts had
    been taken from the graves of middle-aged and older women.

    This extraordinarily sensational case would be even more
    sensationalized with wide reports of cannibalism. However, Harold
    Schechter, who wrote "Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original 'Psycho," has stated that there is no evidence that Gein ever
    ate human flesh. Perhaps the perception of Gein-the-cannibal is a
    result of seeing him as such a monster that every possible monstrosity
    was attributed to him.

    One part of the house Gein's house not cluttered. The bedroom and
    parlor of Augusta Gein, Ed Gein's deceased mother, the area had been
    sealed off from the rest of the dwelling. When it was exposed to
    view, was found to be perfectly tidy. As Schecter astutely wrote,
    "After the unholy squalor of the rest of the house, the very neatness
    of these rooms was intensely unsettling." Alfred Hitchcock captured
    that sense of eeriness in "Psycho" when Lila Crane (Vera Miles)
    ventures into the room of Norman Bates' "Mother."

    The origin of Ed Gein's madness turned out to lie in the overly close relationship of Ed to his beloved mother, Augusta.

    Edward Theodore Gein was born in Le Crosse, Wisconsin August 27, 1906,
    the second child of George and Augusta Gein.

    George Gein was a hard drinking man who drifted from job to job,
    selling insurance, doing carpentry and working as a tanner, in a power
    plant, and at a railway. Despite his boozing, George had a ramrod
    straight posture and dignified manner that could make a positive
    impression.

    At 24, George met a 19-year-old named Augusta upon whom he evidently
    made such an impression.

    Augusta was a large-breasted, heavyset young woman with a broad face.
    She had been brought up in a deeply religious Lutheran household.
    Augusta had been especially close to her strict father who took
    seriously the Biblical injunction that to "spare the rod" is to "spoil
    the child."

    George and Augusta Gein married December 4, 1899. The marriage was
    troubled from the start. George's drinking meant he had trouble
    keeping a job. He drank the couple's money away and Augusta furiously
    derided him. Not a verbal person, George responded to her tirades by alternating giving her the silent treatment or hitting her.

    Their sex life was never good, in part because of Augusta's extreme
    beliefs on the subject. She believed fornication and adultery were the
    worst of sins. She saw sex even within marriage as a distasteful, an expression of a husband's vile lust and a duty a wife performed for
    the sake of procreation. For all her Bible reading, Augusta appeared
    to have overlooked or disregarded the Song of Solomon with is richly
    sensuous and frankly erotic paean to sexual desire and enjoyment
    between husband and wife. Nor does she appear to have realized the
    full implications of the phrase in Genesis describing married people
    as "one flesh."

    However, Augusta yearned for a baby so she did her sexual duty,
    distasteful as it was.

    George and Augusta's first son, Henry, was born January 17, 1902.

    His birth gave Augusta someone upon whom to lavish affection but it
    did not improve the Gein marriage. George Gein continued to bounce
    from job to job and Augusta continued to harangue him.

    Augusta decided that the solution to George's employmnet difficulties
    was for him to go into business for himself. In 1909, George became
    the owner of a small grocery store. A classic "mom and pop" operation, Augusta did much of the work as George would not give up liquor and
    apply himself to the business.

    The birth of Henry had not assuaged Augusta's longings. She believed
    it might be because he was a boy. Augusta was a man-hater but her
    misandry does not appear to have been "feminist." Rather, her severe anti-sexual feelings led her to hate men because they caroused around, committing fornication and adultery. Her stern religiosity led her to
    despise the sex that so frequently took the Lord's name in vain.

    Augusta believed a little girl would be much easier to bring up in
    what she considered traditionally proper ways. A female would be far
    more likely to be chaste and pious, sober and obedient.

    She again allowed George to have sex and again got pregnant. She
    prayed for a girl.

    But she gave birth to Edward Theodore Gein.

    She was bitterly disappointed when she learned her child was a boy.
    However, as Schechter writes, "Augusta was not the kind to give in to despair. She was made of stronger stuff. And so she took the swaddled
    newborn in her arms and made a sacred vow. This one would not grow up
    to be like all the rest of them. Men. Those lustful, swearing, foul-
    mouthed creatures who made use of women's bodies in such filthy ways,
    This one, she promised, would be different. Augusta would see to
    that."

    When the adult Ed Gein was asked about his mother, tears would
    inevitably fill his eyes. She was so good, he would say, so pure and
    pious. She was exactly what a woman should be.

    When Eddie was seven, Augusta decided that the family must leave La
    Crosse. She believed the city was a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah,
    full of fornication and adultery. Her sons must not be exposed to such degradation as she was determined to bring them up to be free of
    sexual sin.

    The Geins had accumulated enough money to purchase a small farm. Late
    in 1913, the family bought a small dairy farm about forty miles east
    of La Crosse.

    For reasons that are not known, the family moved again in 1914 to a
    farm in Plainfield.

    Augusta was pleased with the most recent acquisition. The farm was 195
    acres and boasted a fairly nice two-story house along with a barn, a
    chicken coop, and an equipment shack.

    Its isolation was a big plus because here Augusta could keep her
    precious sons safe from the temptations of Plainfield itself. She
    believed sinful, ungodly activities, particularly sexual activities,
    were rampant in the town.

    A fastidious housekeeper, Augusta kept the home squeaky clean and neat
    as a pin. She believed in the maxim that "cleanliness is next to
    godliness" and no one was more determined to be godly than Augusta
    Gein.

    Although Augusta wanted to keep her boys as far away from earthly
    temptations as she could, there was no way to avoid sending them to
    school since it was compulsory.

    Little Eddie was an average student. He soon acquired a special
    fondness for reading that he would maintain throughout his life.

    However, he did not enjoy school. As Schecter writes, Eddie "had a
    fat, fleshy growth on the corner of his left eyelid. It wasn't really disfiguring, but it made his eyelid droop." Some children teased
    Eddie about the eyelid. He was shy and hung back from groups. He could
    not make friends.

    Occasionally, he would find a child that he hoped to befriend. When he
    got home, he would tell Mom about the kid. She would inevitably raise objections, saying the proposed pal was from a family with a bad
    reputation.

    The marriage between George and Augusta, never warm, was getting
    increasingly fractious. He retreated into drink and she into an ever
    more fervent and narrow religiousness. Fights were frequent and bitter
    but divorce was out of the question. As Schecter notes, "Divorce was unthinkable, a fundamental violation of her religious beliefs." To
    Augusta Gein, life was not something to be enjoyed but a series of
    burdens to be borne. She did her duty no matter what.

    As Henry and Ed grew into adolescence, Augusta made an extra effort to
    ensure these boys did not fall into the ways of sin like other young
    men. Modern women were a bunch of brazen hussies, she would tell the
    boys, and these evil creatures must be righteously shunned.

    Often Augusta read out loud to Henry and Ed directly from the Bible.
    Almost always, she read warnings against lustful iniquity.

    A favorite passage was Revelation 17: 3-5. It stated, "So he carried
    me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon
    a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven
    heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet
    colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a
    golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, 'MYSTERY,
    BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE
    EARTH."

    Augusta also liked to recite Proverbs 5:3-4 to her sons:
    "The lips of a strange woman drop honey,
    And her mouth is smoother than oil;
    But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,
    Sharp as a two-edged sword."

    Augusta frequently asked her sons to swear that they would remain
    sexually pure. The dutiful boys affirmed that they would.

    In 1940, George Gein passed away at the age of 66. It is unlikely he
    was deeply mourned by his widow or sons. In 1942, 36-year-old Ed Gein
    got a draft notice. He went to Milwaukee for the physical exam and
    the military rejected him due to the growth on his eyelid because it
    caused slight problems with his vision.

    Back to home, Henry, and Mom. In 1944, Henry was killed in a brush
    fire near the Gein farmhouse. Although later many suspected Ed, it was
    never proven that he caused his brother's death.

    So then it was just Ed and Mom. As Tony Perkins playing Gein-inspired
    Norman Bates in "Psycho" would say, "A boy's best friend is his
    mother" and they were each other's primary company.

    However, Augusta suffered a stroke soon after her elder's son
    unexpected death. She was able to come home from the hospital but was disabled. Ed tended to her every need. As she had so often read the
    Bible to her sons, she now requested that Ed read it to her as he sat
    by her bedside.

    Under Eddie's dedicated ministrations, Augusta began to recover. She
    was back to walking and even doing some household and farm chores. It
    was 1945 and Augusta noted that they needed straw.

    Eddie and Augusta went to a neighbor named Smith to buy it. When their vehicle pulled into Smith's yard, they saw him violently beating a dog
    with a stick. A woman came out of the house and screamed at Smith to
    leave the poor pooch alone. Smith beat the dog to death.

    Augusta was extremely upset by this scene. What bothered her did not
    appear to be the brutality toward the dog but the presence of the
    woman. Augusta told Ed that the woman was not married to Smith and so
    had no business being there. "Smith's harlot," Augusta angrily called
    her.

    It always seemed to Ed that Augusta's emotional upheaval over this
    apparently unmarried relationship is what contributed to the second,
    and fatal, stroke she suffered later that week.

    Augusta had sown the seeds of Ed's madness. But she had also been his
    one human connection. Without her, the lonely and isolated man
    descended into true insanity. However, that craziness would be of a
    special sort not evident to his neighbors who continued to see him as
    shy, quiet, pleasant Eddie Gein.

    Until Frank Worden found that his own mother was missing.

    Although Ed Gein is often called a serial murderer, Bernice Worden and
    Mary Hogan are his only known victims. Both were stout, older women -
    like his mother. However, in some ways they seemed most unlike his
    mother to Ed.

    In the aftermath of Augusta Gein's death, Ed pondered long and hard at
    this cruel injustice. In a world filled with harlots, how could God
    have allowed his mother, a woman so good and pure, to die?

    Mary Hogan bore a physical resemblance to Augusta but Ed thought of
    the tavern keeper as opposite in personality. She used swear words. He
    had heard rumors of her immorality, how she had been twice divorced
    and may even have once been the madam of a brothel! Her very life
    seemed an affront to the memory of his mother.

    Similarly, although Bernice Worden was popular in Plainfield, Ed saw
    the hearty business owner as a Scarlet Woman. He had heard rumors
    that, prior to her marriage, Bernice had wooed the man who would
    become her husband away from another woman and that the disappointed
    woman had committed suicide as a result. He also believed Bernice
    Worden had been responsible for the break-up of a marriage.

    Ultimately, what is to be learned from the life of Augusta Gein? It
    may be seen as a confirmation of the old saying, "The road to hell is
    paved with good intentions." It is also a warning on many levels:
    against "smother-mothering," against sexual repression, against
    religious fanaticism, and against a life lived in a "bite-the-bullet, all-work-and-no-play" manner.

    It is also a reminder that misandry and misogyny are not necessarily
    polar opposites but can go hand-in-hand. Like Augusta, the same person
    who views men as crude and lustful beasts can often view women as
    temptresses and harlots.

    In today's culture, the pendulum may have swung too far in the
    opposite direction from Augusta Gein's dogmas. Many people, including
    myself, would like to see less sexual activity. However, looking at
    Augusta tells us we must exercise great care as to HOW we encourage abstinence. It is easy, yet destructive, to encourage abstinence by inculcating suspicion and hostility of the other gender or of human
    beings in general. Both young men and young women must be taught how
    to keep friendships on a "just-friends" basis and how to keep romantic relationships from necessarily becoming physical too quickly. But they
    must not be abstinent out of a hysterical fear of the flesh or a
    destructive hostility.

    "Just Say No" can turn into its own dangerous form of obsession as
    shown by the peculiarly one-track mind of Augusta Gein.

    Really intriguing.

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  • From cajinafrank8@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 8 20:33:08 2018
    YEAH, WELL IT IS WHAT IT IS

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